Woodrow

Joash Woodrow (1927-2006) could have easily been quickly forgotten when he died in a Manchester nursing home. It was by pure chance that his rich artistic legacy was discovered. He created hundreds of paintings but they were never seen by others - never sold and never exhibited. They could have all so easily ended up in a skip (American: dumpster).

He lived reclusively in his parents' home in the Chapel Allerton area of north Leeds. Before and just after World War II he received  good formal training at Leeds College of Art and at The Royal College of Art in London. He knew what art was and what it might be.

Some time thereafter he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the next five decades painting furiously and passionately but without the sustenance that other artists might provide. He didn't even have a telephone.

His brother Saul tried to visit him every week but never got to see any of the pictures that Joash had created. It seems that Joash Woodrow made art because he was driven to do so. It was the art that mattered, not what others might think about it.

After Joash went into care, Saul delivered a huge collection of art books from the old family home to a local secondhand bookstore and that's where several were spotted by another Leeds artist called Christopher Wood.  They included many overpaintings and drawings by Joash Woodrow.  Wood alerted a gallery owner from nearby Harrogate who effectively saved the collection from destruction.

Exhibitions of Joash Woodrow's work happened before his death and some paintings were sold but he never knew about this as his last three years were spent in a kind of mental incarceration and perhaps Saul  remembered that his brother had never actively sought acclaim.

Untitled and undated but just for a small taste of him, here are four examples of Joash Woodrow's art as discovered in his house in Leeds:-

A preparatory sketch

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/favoWPi